WMU-Cooley announces campus closure, lower tuition

Auburn Hills campus to close in 2020

Western Michigan University Cooley Law School recently announced a pair of changes coming to the school next year.

WMU-Cooley announced that it plans to close its Auburn Hills campus in December 2020, but will be able to reduce tuition from $1,750 per credit hour to $1,375 per credit hour beginning in the fall semester of 2020.

“We looked at a number of factors, the attractiveness to students, the distance from Western Michigan University, plus the value of salability of the buildings,” said President and Dean James McGrath. “We tried to pick the campus that would have the lowest impact overall.”

Due to the closing of the Auburn Hills campus, McGrath said the school will have to “teach out” the students currently enrolled there, and there will be options for students just starting their legal education.

“We hope they stay with Cooley. Some of them have the option to transfer to another school. Our beginning students can elect to not go to Cooley and get a full refund,” McGrath said. “We’re hoping they stay with us because we’ll be open through December 2020. A lot of students will graduate.”

McGrath also said students can front-load classes if they’re getting close to graduation so that they can complete a semester using their allotment of online classes. Students can also transfer to WMU-Cooley’s other campuses in Michigan or Florida.

When WMU-Cooley closed its Ann Arbor campus five years ago, McGrath said the school provided an incentive package to students who wanted to stay with the school but needed to move to a different campus.

“We’re not exactly sure what that looks like, but it will probably be similar to five years ago. It was a reduction on their tuition to help ease them into their move if they wanted to relocate,” McGrath said.

If students don’t desire to move, McGrath said the school will also work with students to come up with schedules that avoid commuting to other campuses on a daily basis.

As for faculty, McGrath said the school may have a few redundancies in staff, but doesn’t anticipate much faculty attrition.

“When we looked at the impact on the school’s bottom line after closing any of the campuses, we determined that this is the one that has the best impact for us right now in terms of realizing the savings of closing one of these huge buildings while having the least impact on students,” McGrath said.

The closing of the campus is also a response to market conditions, McGrath said.

“It’s a nationwide trend with a huge drop in applications since 2008. Just recently they’ve bumped back a little bit,” McGrath said. “We’re planning to right-size Cooley for the future. It could be in the future where we only have two or one campus, we don’t know, but for now this is a good step in reducing our footprint so we can do things like a tuition drop.”

Lower tuition

McGrath said one benefit to closing the Auburn Hills campus will be the 21-percent reduction in tuition.

“We have so much excess capacity, and that excess capacity is expensive. By reducing our costs, we can offer lower tuition,” McGrath said. “I think it also puts us in a more competitive place as well. Some of the schools we compete with, their tuition is much lower. Our tuition crept up to meet the school’s needs over the years.”

To provide more context into the excess capacity, McGrath said WMU-Cooley’s buildings were built and acquired with the purpose of becoming the nation’s largest law school.

At one point, McGrath reported that the school had 3,900 students enrolled, but currently has 1,184 students; 745 of those students are enrolled at Michigan campuses, and 231 are enrolled in Auburn Hills.

“We think a more reasonable number is going to be less than 1,000 students for sure. The high tuition was one of the first things I noticed that didn’t align with our mission or goals. We agreed to find a way to make this happen,” said McGrath, who began his position on July 1. “We priced ourselves a lot higher than other places our students might apply to.”

WMU-Cooley’s plan to close its Auburn Hills campus is subject to approval of the ABA Council on Legal Education and the Higher Learning Commission.

If you would like to comment on this story, email Thomas Franz at tfranz@mi.lawyersweekly.com.